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Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

I love college basketball because it is still a game that just often enough rewards hard work, preparation, sacrifice, team play and grit. Butler basketball personifies all of those attributes and when you pair that with the best coach in the game special things happen.

I hope Steven's never leaves. This is the perfect situation for him and his approach. If he were at Duke or IU could he ever recruit a kid like Roosevelt Jones? That guy is the perfect Butler player. So often the best player on the court but with his unorthodox style and less than ideal size/athleticism will play all 4-years and win this program many big games.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

Just an amazing game and what a finish!

Butler continues the magic. It's pretty remarkable that this team continues to answer the bell with new faces, coaches, etc. Butler is evolving into a truly elite basketball program right before our eyes.

A normal, non-deadbeat sports fan gets to experience maybe one of these nights per lifetime, in person — perhaps two if you’re lucky, although nothing is guaranteed. An event where you genuinely take pause and marvel at what is unfolding in front of you, as it is unfolding, even when it’s just the surroundings you are marveling at and the game has just begun.

Hinkle Fieldhouse was an electrified movie set well before tip-off. All it did througout the night was continuously and unrelentingly become more so. More electric, more ficticious-feeling, more artfully directed and crazed and very very obvious that its plot line was headed toward only one, inescapable conclusion. And when it finally did — good Lord. (NO WORDS, SHOULD HAVE SENT A POET, ETC., ETC.!!) The apparently inevitability of it all did not lessen its impact, and whether John Williams scored that final climatic scene or Rosie Jones, it hardly mattered. None of it seemed real, but less of it seemed contrived. It was the single greatest basketball game I have ever experienced first-hand.

And as we cartwheeled into the euphoric warzone of Broad Ripple soon thereafter, I got a text from my friend Nate Dunlevy: Tell me that being at that game was every single bit as amazing as I imagine it was.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

The Hardcourt Shuffle: That Old Butler Magic, Cuse is in the House
By Shane Ryan on January 21, 2013 12:36 PM ET
Michael Hickey/Getty Images

Let's begin by delving into the realm of the imagination. Pretend it's November 1, 2012, and you and I are real-life acquaintances. Pretend we're having a conversation on a park bench near a vacant outdoor court. The wind is whistling, and it's far too cold to even consider playing, but we can't help stare longingly at the torn net hanging from the bent rim. The wind dies down for a moment, and I tell you that I've had a vision. There will be a number of buzzer-beaters this year, I say, but only one of them will be truly peculiar. You'll watch the replay over and over, but you still won't quite be able to wrap your mind around how it all happened. And tell me, I continue, as the wind begins to howl, tell me which team is involved. More than that, tell me which team wins.

We both know what you'd say, even without the benefit of a mystic vision. "Butler." Of course you'd say Butler. It's always Butler.

Back to the present. If you haven't seen the strangest ending to a college basketball game this season, watch it now. We pick up the action just after Kelly Olynyk makes two free throws to put Gonzaga up 63-62 with 4.6 seconds left:

There are so many thoughts rushing through my brain right now that I need numbers to make sense of it all. So,

1. I still have no idea if Roosevelt Jones got the shot off in time. To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with the decision the referees made. I would've done the same thing. But I don't know if it's right. All of which indicates what many college basketball fans have feared for weeks: The ghost of Sabatino Chen is going to haunt this entire season.

2. Let's talk about that inbounds pass by Dave Stockton, son of all-time NBA assists and steals leader John Stockton. On the surface, it looks pretty poor; he just throws a lob straight to Rosey Jones. But look closer and you'll notice that at the time he releases the ball, or milliseconds before, Kelly Olynyk has good body position on Jones. The physics of Stockton's pass make sense (we'll get to the philosophy in a second), and if Olynyk had just stayed, it would've been an easy thing to make the catch.

3. Except that one of two things happened. Either Olynyk broke away right as Stockton threw the pass, a miscommunication that led to the gift turnover, or — OR — Jones shoved Olynyk at the perfect moment, a classic push-off that led to the turnover. I've watched the video over and over and still can't tell. My gut says it's some combination of the two; Jones definitely had his forearm in Olynyk, but I also think the Canadian dashed away at the worst possible moment. Or, if you prefer, Stockton threw the pass too soon.

4. However, here's some evidence in favor of the push-off. In this interview, Jones drops this nugget:

"I heard the coach tell Stockton to lob it up to Olynyk, so I played behind him. And Stockton actually lobbed it too far, and it fell right in my hands."

In other words, he knew exactly what was coming. And, in all likelihood, knew exactly when a little shove would do the most damage.

5. Which brings up another point: When discussing strategy at a crucial point in the game, DO NOT share that strategy with an opposing player. Inadvertently or not.

6. Especially if the strategy is bad. With 3.5 seconds remaining, inbounding the ball with a one-point lead, the thing you definitely want to avoid is giving the ball to a guard near midcourt with room to run. So why lob the ball into that area? Gonzaga could have done almost anything else — including passing the ball to a Butler player under the far basket — and forced a desperation heave. Stockton's orders, with no timeouts, should have been as follows: Pass the ball to an open player on a cut, so that the pass can't possibly be intercepted. If that fails — and it shouldn't, since inbounding is a relatively simple task, even under intense road pressure — lob the ball toward the other hoop and make Butler go the length of the floor. The two things you cannot do are to lob into no-man's-land, or take a five-second violation. That's it. Why over-think it by designing a modified post-up near half court?

7. Moving on, I'm now convinced that Butler is virtually unbeatable in close games. Without looking it up, I can think of eight high-profile games that Butler won by fewer than three points. I mean, there are three already just this year — Marquette, Indiana, and now Gonzaga. They always find a way. As for close games they lost? I can think of one.

8. But let's get more scientific. In games decided by five points or fewer in the past four years, Butler is 26-9. In postseason elimination games (conference tournament, NIT, NCAA), Brad Stevens is 6-1. Those numbers are incredible, and it's tempting to use it as more evidence for the idea that Stevens is a basketball genius. Which he probably is. But what's really remarkable to me is how lucky they've been. This year, you had Rotnei Clarke's desperation 3 and Dave Stockton's ill-advised pass. In the 2011 tournament, you had a series of favorable tips and bounces that led to another buzzer-beater against Old Dominion, the indescribably weird ending against 1-seed Pittsburgh in the round of 32, and a collapse by Florida. In 2010, the games were just close without being borderline supernatural, but winning three games by eight points has to be considered its own kind of luck. We already knew the Bulldogs were the ultimate Cinderella, but it looks like their clock never strikes midnight.

9. One thing I really love about Brad Stevens is how totally composed he remains on the sideline in scenes of complete mayhem. In this grainy shot from the Marquette game, you can see him in the lower-left hand corner calmly walking to shake Buzz Williams's hand after Clarke's prayer falls. Watch the Gonzaga video again and focus on Stevens at around the :53 mark; he crosses his arms, watches the steal, takes two steps toward Mark Few as Jones launches the shot, and puts his head down just after it goes down as he moves in for the handshake. It's insane. He never reacts. There may be some inconclusive video evidence that he once sort of pumped his fist, but I can't be sure. So, considering the fact that he wins a lopsided percentage of close games — some of them in bizarre fashion — and never seems surprised, my question is this: What does he know??

10. The explanation is probably just that Brad Stevens is a genius. As usual, he managed to rein in a high-powered offense and dictate the tempo and style of play. As usual, his team was physical, tough, resilient, focused, relentless. As usual, Butler survived a rough patch — in this case, an 18-11 start by Gonzaga — erased the deficit, and turned the game into a war of attrition. Notice how the game finished with 58 possessions for each team, 10 fewer than Gonzaga's average. Notice how for the second time this season, the Butler bigs held a talented center (Zeller, Olynyk) well below his season average. Notice how the guards, especially Jones, attacked the basket, resulting in Butler going to the line almost twice as often as the Zags.

In the end, this game followed the formula of so many classic Butler wins over the last four years: Scout the hell out of the opponent and take away what they like to do, refuse to be out-muscled on defense, keep the game close, and then get lucky in the final minute. Even with 3.5 on the clock and a 1-point lead, Mark Few had spent the final 30 minutes of the game watching Stevens make all the important choices. Gonzaga had been dragged down from the level of beautiful offensive execution into a frustrating tug-of-war. No matter what happened on the final play, they were already beat.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

I loved #9 especially. If I'm looking at the replay right (it's kind of blurry though), it does look like he hardly even pays attention to the final shot. Which fits right in with what he was saying after the game about only caring about process and not results.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

Saw this on FB, thought of you guys

Congratulations to Kevin Schwartz, BUTLER 2014 on sinking his recent game day half court shot. Schwartz, who is a junior at Butler, had 5 chances to shoot from half court for a chance to win $18,000 in scholarship money. However, he decided he only needed one.

Schwartz broke an 0-for-32 drought for the half court shot on "College Game Day" on his first try and has been all the buzz on ESPN this weekend.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

Congratulations to Kevin Schwartz, BUTLER 2014 on sinking his recent game day half court shot. Schwartz, who is a junior at Butler, had 5 chances to shoot from half court for a chance to win $18,000 in scholarship money. However, he decided he only needed one.

Schwartz broke an 0-for-32 drought for the half court shot on "College Game Day" on his first try and has been all the buzz on ESPN this weekend.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

I've thought this team was a Final Four team all year. If you're a 1 seed, and Butler is in your bracket, you might as well just stay home.

(If Butler wins their league and tournament, they should be a 1 seed)

Of course we're way ahead of ourselves, but I think it'd be better for Butler (and IU for that matter) to be a 2-3 seed in the Midwest at Lucas Oil than a 1 out West. If somehow they were to get through the rest of the conference with 2 or fewer losses and get at least to the championship game of the A-10 tourney, it's hard to see where they wouldn't have one of the 4 best resumes in the country.

If Butler wins both their games this week, at a pretty good LaSalle without Rotnei Clarke, and hosting Temple, I will be extremely impressed.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

To the topic at hand, I said going into it that I felt winner of Butler-Gonzaga has a great shot at a 2 seed. So I think obviously BU is now in a great position for that. I think they could afford to lose two more games in conference and still have a pretty good grip on it.

Also, does Roosevelt Jones's game remind anyone else of a slightly smaller young Artest minus the crazy? That was the best comparison I could come up with. Dunno if anyone else remembers Ron at St. John's.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

To the topic at hand, I said going into it that I felt winner of Butler-Gonzaga has a great shot at a 2 seed. So I think obviously BU is now in a great position for that. I think they could afford to lose two more games in conference and still have a pretty good grip on it.

Also, does Roosevelt Jones's game remind anyone else of a slightly smaller young Artest minus the crazy? That was the best comparison I could come up with. Dunno if anyone else remembers Ron at St. John's.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

Nope, Butler can be placed there as well. Don't know that it's ever happened before, but I'm guessing it has. I wonder if while it is not a specfific rule that I'm aware of but more of an unspoken thing. It has really made it hard on the comittee that the west is so weak. It looks like yet again an east coast or midwest team is going to have to play the 1 out of the west bracket. Which is really what you want to avoid.

So apparently there is a rule stipulating that a host school cannot be placed in their regional. Fortunately, Butler had the foresight to remove their hosting duties. The hosts are now just the Horizon League and IUPUI. So Butler can conceivably be placed in the Indy bracket.

The Following User Says Thank You to BRushWithDeath For This Useful Post:

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

Right now in Lunardi's bracketology he has Butler as the 3 seed in the Indianapolis regional. He has Michigan as #1 and Louisville as #2. That would be pretty amazing for the city if all of them made it.

Well if you remember, in his early NBA career Artest was not much of a shooter, he was actually decent ball handler who got a lot of his points by muscling to the basket and doing work in the paint which was why he struggled quite a bit in our ECF against Detroit and their shot blockers.

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

Right now in Lunardi's bracketology he has Butler as the 3 seed in the Indianapolis regional. He has Michigan as #1 and Louisville as #2. That would be pretty amazing for the city if all of them made it.

Andy Glockner has Butler as the 2 and IU as the 3 in the Indy regional. How pissed would Syracuse be to get 1 seed but have both of them in their region?

Re: 2012-2013 Butler Basketball

I'm assuming since he has them in Indy it means they're his highest 3. Right now, I can't see it being too difficult to find 8 teams with better resumes. He's got Duke, Kansas, Syracuse, and Michigan as his 1's. Florida, Louisville, Butler, and Arizona as his 2's. I fully expect them to get no lower than a 2 but at this point, because of an absurd out of conference schedule and relatively easy start in B1G play their resume isn't great yet and it looks like he goes directly off of what has been done and not what he expects to happen.